Audio cue control solutions

[ProfDrJones]

I do appologize if this question is stupid, but I'm not a professional light engineer and haven't found a good solution so far. If there's an industry solution, please point me in the right direction.

We are using our Zero88 FLX mainly for theatre and small music shows. Specially for theatre, there are often audio playbacks e.g. a telefone ring accompanied by a light cue. For the last 20 years our solution was to press the play button on the audioplayer and the Go button on the light controller simultaniously, which could get stressfull if other actions like a short burst from a fog machine (not DMX controller at the moment), a video cue, ... would follow.

What seems to be the industry standard is "Midi Show Control" which requires a computer and running the show on there. I already tested this solution and I works fine, but I'm not very fond of using a Laptop for running shows for several reasons, one of them being older volunteers that run shows and are well versed with the light and audio controls but struggle with computers.

I would love to cue audio playbacks via the FLX, so the volunteers would only have to trigger a cue via the GO button and the audio would be trigger automatically.

The solutions I found that is more along these line are DMX controlled audio players, but there applications seem to be focused on showrooms and museums, which would explain why most of them don't have a display or other user interface of any kind.

Have I missed another solution?
Is there maybe a way to add midi commands to a cue and send them from within the FLX?

[Edward Z88]

Hi @ProfDrJones

Welcome to the Zero 88 Forum.

1 hour ago, ProfDrJones said:

What seems to be the industry standard is "Midi Show Control" which requires a computer and running the show on there. I already tested this solution and I works fine, but I'm not very fond of using a Laptop for running shows for several reasons, one of them being older volunteers that run shows and are well versed with the light and audio controls but struggle with computers.

1 hour ago, ProfDrJones said:

Is there maybe a way to add midi commands to a cue and send them from within the FLX?

FLX consoles can only output lighting data. They cannot send out MIDI commands. This is because when using MIDI, it is standard practice to use the audio source device as the MIDI source device too. This means you can fire an audio cue (using software such as QLab if using a Mac), and simultaneously send a MIDI command. This can then be received by FLX to trigger a lighting cue.

For detailed information on using MIDI Show Control with FLX, please see the link below...

https://zero88.com/manuals/print?manual=zeros&type=section&content=midi-show-control

I hope this helps. If you have any questions, please let me know.

Edward

[kgallen]

I have this underlying requirement too (or maybe I like tinkering!) where I would like to trigger my sound cues from lighting cues. At the moment I too press Go on my FLX and Play on one of my Sony MDS-E12 minidisc decks. 
 

My solution is to build a DMX interface to ‘contact closure’ (or possibly RS232 commands if I want to get fancy), but it would be nice to take MIDI from the FLX instead 🙂

Need to tick the appropriate box in the ‘new features’ list for FLX in the General Discussion section!

[Erics]

For this i used a DMX music player in the past:

https://www.ulrichradig.de/home/index.php/dmx/dmx-rdm-mp3-player

That works well for any kind of DMX desk.

Now i have a FLX S48 and a chamsys MQ70. And chamsys can now easy play any standard audio file in a cue list. You can use it with the PC or mac software with a soundcard or with the direct audio out of the lightningh desk. So it is very easy now. Save a cuelist, select the sound file from the internal memory or a usb drive. and when the cuelist starts the audio plays as well. You could also use this to programm timecoded cues to audio files.
Perhaps it would be possible with phantom ZeroOS. Or you could support USB soundcard for the desk as well. That is also possible on chamsys now. So i would call it a feature request 😉

[Edward Z88]

Hi @kgallen & @ProfDrJones

18 hours ago, ProfDrJones said:

Is there maybe a way to add midi commands to a cue and send them from within the FLX?

14 hours ago, kgallen said:

it would be nice to take MIDI from the FLX instead 🙂

MIDI Show Control output is logged on our system as reference number ZOS-5421. I have logged both of your requests and raised the priority.

Edward

[kgallen]

Thanks Edward! The key for me is the sound source is designed to be controlled/triggered (like a dimmer or luminaire) whereas the lighting desk (FLX) is designed to be a controllER. So being able to generate control actions from the FLX (by outputting MIDI rather than just receiving MIDI) makes network topology sense to me. FLX doesn’t have any other ‘auxiliary’ control outputs. 

[ProfDrJones]

Thanks Edward.

@kgallen I'm a sofware engineer and thinkerer my self, therefore the thinkering solution might be the way to go for now. I already built a DMX receiver based on an arduino for a couple of simple show effects like a telefone that can ring on stage or some stepper motors for the colorwheels of our older spotlights. A signal converter to a reduced MIDI command-set shouldn't be that hard to implement from what I've seen in the MIDI protocoll specs.

[Muller Light]

Hello Prof Dr J,

Something that I have been meaning to code, but have never had the time, is a sACN to Windows PC 'key press' program.

I use SoundPlant to play sound cues on a laptop and press both lighting desk go button and PC keyboard when I need to trigger both Lx and SFx simultaneously.

What the sACN to keypress program would do, is to produce a pseuso 'keypress' when a certain DMX (encoded in sACN) value was received.  This would trigger the appropriate sound effect.

The program would have to only produce the keypress when the data changed (so as not to continuously trigger) and the DMX and keypress values would need to be definable by the user in eg an xml config file.

This would work with any PC program, not just SoundPlant, and any desk that outputs sACN.  (I have a Solution, not FLX)

Hope you can code this as I think it would be very useful.

 

Paul